These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Cost of Living Comparison


I have spoken with many students that are facing decisions as to where to start their career after graduation. I personally received three offers and took all the time I could to research the companies, locations, and compensation packages in order to come up with a decision that would best suit my family and me. Ultimately, I accepted the offer with the lowest salary. It was $8,000 lower than the highest salary, but I still feel I got the best deal because of the location among other factors important to my family.

The company I accepted an offer with has recently decided to pause its active recruiting at Brigham Young University. This is because there is not very good turnover of interns to full-time students. Recruiters feel this is due to the appearance of a lower offer value on paper than other companies. However, what the students don’t take into consideration is how far that salary goes in that location compared to other companies in their respective locations.

This Cost of Living Comparison tool provides users with a central location to select a target city and salary along with as many comparison cities as they would like in order to make a good decision. The tool displays what kind of a salary the user would need in the selected comparison cities in order to have the same lifestyle as in the target city with the given salary. It also displays comparisons for expenses in different categories like food, housing and utilities compared to the national average.

I feel this tool will really help its users to make a more educated decision on the acceptance of an offer based on factors other than the pure salary figure.


Chandler Egbert 


http://files.gove.net/shares/files/14f/echandle/ChandlerEgbert-Final_Project_Report.pdf

http://files.gove.net/shares/files/14f/echandle/CostOfLivingCalc.xlsm

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